Moon rocket engines recovered from bottom of Atlantic ocean

A year ago, Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos blogged on his Bezos Expeditions venture fund site that an undersea exploration (financed and directed by Bezos himself) had located some of the enormous F-1 rocket engines used by Apollo 11. The engines were about 14,000 feet (about 4,270 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida and had been there ever since July 16, 1969, when they'd been lit for about 150 seconds to propel Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle off the launch pad and to the Moon.

Bezos' intent was to recover one or more of the engines for display, and this morning he is reporting success: after more than 40 years resting on the seabed, components from several F-1 engines have been raised back to the surface.

Enlarge/ A crewman sprays water over a recovered injector plate. Clearly visible are the holes through which 1 ton of RP-1 fuel and 2 tons of liquid oxygen was forced... per second.

Contrary to Bezos' original note, it's currently impossible to determine exactly which flights the engines came from. It's possible they are indeed from Apollo 11's S-IC stage, but the Bezos Expedition site notes that "many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult." Every F-1 engine flown was hand-built and manually assembled, and each major component of an F-1 engine had some form of serial number on it in order to track it through the manufacturing process. If the serial numbers on the recovered components can be deciphered, it will then be a simple matter to determine which Apollo flights they came from.

Enlarge/ One of the serial number plates from F-1 engine number 6049, currently being used at the Marshall Space Flight Center for gas generator testing.

Lee Hutchinson

The Bezos Expedition page includes a video showing some of the recovery process. The depth of nearly three miles—two thousand feet deeper than the wreck of the Titanic—puts the engines firmly out of reach of human divers, so the operation was carried out with Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) controlled from the surface. The engines themselves are truly massive: a fully assembled F-1 is 19 feet (5.8 meters) from nozzle to fuel inlets and weighs about 20,000 lbs (about 9,000 kg). Lifting that much mass from the bottom of the ocean—especially when the parts have been corroded by seawater and made brittle—required a tremendous amount of skill. Fortunately, the team behind the recovery is quite experienced in underwater exploration and salvage—it's headed up by Rory Golden, who previously worked with Dr. Robert Ballard in locating the Titanic.

Enlarge/ An F-1 engine (with nozzle extension) on display at MSFC. Author's wife standing next to engine for scale.

Lee Hutchinson

The expedition has pulled up enough parts to reconstruct two full F-1 engines. The parts need to be restored and stabilized to counteract the effects of air exposure after being immersed in seawater for so long, but Bezos promises that the reconstructed engines will be part of a grand museum-quality display: "We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," notes the blog entry. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Bezos isn't the only one interested in bringing the past back to life. We reported two months ago on efforts at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to resurrect heritage F-1 components and actually subject them to "hot-fire" tests; that effort is still underway and has evolved into a full-scale project to create an entirely new large-scale RP-1/LOX engine, which will compete for the chance to be used in strap-on boosters for NASA's Space Launch System heavy-lift vehicle. This new gigantic engine will be christened the "F-1B," and is being designed to operate at roughly the same performance levels as the uprated F-1A design from the 1960s—about 1.8 millions pounds of thrust (about 8 meganewtons). Ars spent several days at MSFC last month interviewing the engineering team behind the effort, and we've got a lot more F-1B engine coverage coming up soon.

While this is nice and all, doesn't NASA have a history of coming back and claiming that this stuff is still "their property", and subsequently reclaiming it? Given the recent reignited interest (pardon the pun) in the F-1 engine system, I could very well see NASA doing this to Mr. Bezos.

While this is nice and all, doesn't NASA have a history of coming back and claiming that this stuff is still "their property", and subsequently reclaiming it? Given the recent reignited interest (pardon the pun) in the F-1 engine system, I could very well see NASA doing this to Mr. Bezos.

They have before, yeah. Right now, NASA's official response is basically "Congrats, good job, and we look forward to seeing the museum exhibit."

NASA has enough non-submerged F-1 parts to test for the F-1B, but they do tend to be pretty stringent in making sure that government property ultimately remains government property. However, I can't imagine they'd want the components back under these circumstances, especially since Bezos is shouldering the cost of the restoration.

Wow, I almost can't believe they did it. I remember reading about the announcement, but hadn't heard anything since. I assumed the project had just been abandoned, like many other grandiose projects. Fantastic, I can't wait to see this in a museum

sad that we have not advanced much in 40 years in regards to space travel

We landed a probe on Titan; Cassini is on a grand tour of Saturn more successful than the average Carnival Cruise; we had a controlled, powered flight of a car sized rover that was winched down to the surface of Mars like it's something we do every day; and a little probe named WMAP that revolutionized cosmology, just to name a few. What are you looking for exactly? More military dudes or billionaires floating about for no good purpose?

While this is nice and all, doesn't NASA have a history of coming back and claiming that this stuff is still "their property", and subsequently reclaiming it? Given the recent reignited interest (pardon the pun) in the F-1 engine system, I could very well see NASA doing this to Mr. Bezos.

They could try, but this case would be subject to marine salvage laws.

Regarding the discussion about NASA potentially reclaiming the engines, here's a snippet from the Bezos Expedition site:

"Finally, I want to thank NASA. They extended every courtesy and every helping hand – all of NASA’s interactions were characterized by plain old common sense, something which we all know is impressive and uncommon. We're excited to be bringing a couple of your F-1s home."

While this is nice and all, doesn't NASA have a history of coming back and claiming that this stuff is still "their property", and subsequently reclaiming it? Given the recent reignited interest (pardon the pun) in the F-1 engine system, I could very well see NASA doing this to Mr. Bezos.

They could try, but this case would be subject to marine salvage laws.

I was wondering if these would be considered marine salvage. Isn't the basic rule for that "finders, keepers"?

sad that we have not advanced much in 40 years in regards to space travel

We landed a probe on Titan; Cassini is on a grand tour of Saturn more successful than the average Carnival Cruise; we had a controlled, powered flight of a car sized rover that was winched down to the surface of Mars like it's something we do every day; and a little probe named WMAP that revolutionized cosmology, just to name a few. What are you looking for exactly? More military dudes or billionaires floating about for no good purpose?

Sadly, that is what a lot of people mean. For them, "space program" == "manned space flight", period. Using ion propulsion units to propel missions into the asteroid belt? Means nothing. Landing probes on asteroids? So what? Sending probes to the outer planets? Meh. Driving rovers on the surface of Mars? Who cares?

fwiw, getting people out of LEO is what makes humanity a space faring species. getting robots out there makes robots a space faring species, and they're just not going to appreciate hot orion slave girls like we would.

Was I the only who was just stunned by the amount of fuel that went through the injector plate? 2.5 tons - in ONE second?

Those engines were, and still are, absolute monsters and true, honest to god marvels of engineering. Reading this made me reconsider what it meant to be rocket scientist: http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/dr ... e-saturn-v. Today, there's a lot that can be achieved with simulations and computers. Then, it was all manual calculations and experiments. Fucking awesome.

Was I the only who was just stunned by the amount of fuel that went through the injector plate? 2.5 tons - in ONE second?

Will somebody please think of the cavitation!

See those baffles on the plate? Those damp down the oscillation of the exploding propellents. When you hear the discussions about how "combustion instability" in the F-1 engine stymied engineers for so long and how complex a problem it was to solve--those baffles are the solution. Their number and arrangement took a whole hell of a lot of hours to figure out (and generated no small number of gray hairs for the engineers involved).

This is before computer modeling, too. They had to compute by hand (or with slide rules), build, test, review, and iterate. Today, we'd simulate the entire thing in a computer.

And if you think this is a fascinating topic....well, just wait for the F-1B piece.

Was I the only who was just stunned by the amount of fuel that went through the injector plate? 2.5 tons - in ONE second?

Will somebody please think of the cavitation!

See those baffles on the plate? Those damp down the oscillation of the exploding propellents. When you hear the discussions about how "combustion instability" in the F-1 engine stymied engineers for so long and how complex a problem it was to solve--those baffles are the solution. Their number and arrangement took a whole hell of a lot of hours to figure out (and generated no small number of gray hairs for the engineers involved).

This is before computer modeling, too. They had to compute by hand (or with slide rules), build, test, review, and iterate. Today, we'd simulate the entire thing in a computer.

And if you think this is a fascinating topic....well, just wait for the F-1B piece.

Pretty sure Bezos would make a great Bond villain if he wasn't doing all this for the benefit of humanity. I just love the fact that he, Musk and others have the money, desire and mindset to really accomplish some truly amazing and important things.

This is fantastic, both in terms of fun reporting from Ars and to Bezos for spending his cash to do this. It would be extra cool if they can verify the identity of the engine parts as being from Apollo 11 itself. Even if it's not, it's still super cool.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.